CLUBWOMEN’S READING

I—­The Malady

A well-dressed woman entered the Art Department of a large public library.  “Have you any material on the Medici?” she asked the custodian.  “Yes; just what kind of material do you want?” “Stop a minute,” cried the woman, extending a detaining hand; “before you get me anything, just tell me what they are!” Librarians are trained not to laugh.  No one could have detected the ghost of a smile on this one’s face as she lifted the “M” volume of a cyclopedia from a shelf and placed it on the table before the seeker after knowledge.  “There; that will tell you,” she said, and returned to her work.

Not long afterward she was summoned by a beckoning finger.  “I can’t tell from this book,” said the perplexed student, “whether the Medici were a family or a race of people.”  The Art Librarian tried to untie this knot, but it was not long before another presented itself.  “This book doesn’t explain,” said the troubled investigator, “whether the Medici were Florentines or Italians.”  Still without a quiver, the art assistant emitted the required drop of information.  “Shan’t I get you something more now?” she asked.  “Oh, no; this will be quite sufficient,” and taking out pencil and paper the inquirer began to write rapidly with the cyclopedia propped before her.  Presently, when the Art Librarian looked up, her guest had disappeared.  But she was on hand the next morning.  “May I see that book again?” she asked sweetly.  “There are some words here in my copy that I can’t quite make out.”

On another occasion a reader, of the same sex, wandered into the reading-room and began to gaze about her with that peculiar sort of perplexed aimlessness that librarians have come to recognise instinctively as an index to the wearer’s state of mind.  “Have you anything on American travels?” she asked.

“Do you mean travels in America, or travels by Americans in foreign countries?”

“Well; I don’t know—­exactly.”

“Do you want books like Dickens’s American Notes, that give a foreigner’s impression of this country?”

“Ye-es—­possibly.”

“Or books like Hawthorne’s Note Book, telling how a foreign country appears to an American?”

“We-ell; perhaps.”

“Are you following a programme of reading?”

“Yes.”

“May I see it?  That may give me a clue.”

“I haven’t a copy here.”

“Can you give me the name of the person or committee who made it?”

“Oh, I made it myself.”

This was a “facer”; the librarian seemed to have brought up against a stone wall, but she waited, knowing that a situation, unlike a knot, will sometimes untie itself.

The seeker after knowledge also waited for a time.  Then she broke out animatedly: 

“Why, I just wanted American travels, don’t you know?  Funny little stories and things about the sort of Americans that go abroad with a bird-cage!”