THE PHILOSOPHER’S PUBLIC LIBRARY

Suppose a philosopher had a great deal of money to spend—­though this is not in accordance with experience, it is not inherently impossible—­and suppose he thought, as any philosopher does think, that the British public ought to read much more and better books than they do, and that founding public libraries was the way to induce them to do so, what sort of public libraries would he found?  That, I submit, is a suitable topic for a disinterested speculator.

He would, I suppose, being a philosopher, begin by asking himself what a library essentially was, and he would probably come to the eccentric conclusion that it was essentially a collection of books.  He would, in his unworldliness, entirely overlook the fact that it might be a job for a municipally influential builder, a costly but conspicuous monument to opulent generosity, a news-room, an employment bureau, or a meeting-place for the glowing young; he would never think for a moment of a library as a thing one might build, it would present itself to him with astonishing simplicity as a thing one would collect.  Bricks ceased to be literature after Babylon.

His first proceeding would be, I suppose, to make a list of that collection.  What books, he would say, have all my libraries to possess anyhow?  And he would begin to jot down—­with the assistance of a few friends, perhaps—­this essential list.

He would, being a philosopher, insist on good editions, and he would also take great pains with the selection.  It would not be a limited or an exclusive list—­when in doubt he would include.  He would disregard modern fiction very largely, because any book that has any success can always be bought for sixpence, and modern poetry, because, with an exception or so, it does not signify at all.  He would set almost all the Greek and Roman literature in well-printed translations and with luminous introductions—­and if there were no good translations he would give some good man L500 or so to make one—­translations of all that is good in modern European literatures, and, last but largest portion of his list, editions of all that is worthy of our own.  He would make a very careful list of thoroughly modern encyclopaedias, atlases, and volumes of information, and a particularly complete catalogue of all literature that is still copyright; and then—­with perhaps a secretary or so—­he would revise all his lists and mark against every book whether he would have two, five or ten or twenty copies, or whatever number of copies of it he thought proper in each library.

Then next, being a philosopher, he would decide that if he was going to buy a great number of libraries in this way, he was going to make an absolutely new sort of demand for these books, and that he was entitled to a special sort of supply.