Travelling Libraries.

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume IV, Issue 288, 27 November 1902, Page 1

Travelling Libraries.

Oar c immunity having the happy chance of lightening Antajcac isolation by gifts of books, cm an oppoitunity to engage in Itbat noteworthy modern eiverprise, 'the institution of a “tra\elling jib rary.’' Scotland, in the long lago “ Itinerating Libraries” of East ji-othian, cave the first example of |chose, but to Australia belongs (he honour of devising and setting in ■ ct-ion the system which has been at woik since 1859 in South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales, and since 1892 has found ever-increasing success in the American States. “Travelling libraries now go everywhere,” reports the Chautauquan >1 agazine. “To life-saving stations, to lonely lighthouses, to army barracks, to lire departments, to home-reading circles in the tenement districts of our great ciii- s.” There are libraries sent in Idaho to remote mining camps accessible only two months in the year on account of the snow. On Tennessee mountain roads, the itinerant Methodist minister often deposits and gathers up the books when making the rounds of his circuit. Some Stales have given a fair grant in aid, but much private generosity must go, as in Wisconsin, towards “ covering a State with a mantle of i ooks,” and the women’s literary clubs, country minister’c wives and school teachers, have been found warm allies and active supporters, while they report everywl ere the same eagerness for books of fresh and human interest. Some specialisation is required, however, in the volumes forwarded. The frontiersman is austerely contemptuous of problem novels, but devours true romances, as well as travels, history and poetry. The mountaineer has a fondness for argumentative, doctrinal books; and the farmer protests against a case too exclusively agricultural and ipastoral. “Farmers are no fonder (than other men of reading of the beauties of ringbone and spavin to their families gathered about the evening lamp.” Fiction is far preferred, one cultivator remarking that if farmers’ wives read more cheerful literature, “ fewer of them would be in the insane asylums.” The one instance of lack of interest in free reading came from a very young librarian in Kentucky, who wrote, “ The boys read very well, but the girls would rather ravel thread out of a piece of muslin and darn it up again to make something pretty, than read good books.” There are girls’ books indeed, we believe, which rather inculcate than discourage this sort of art; but it is quaint to discover the “ old Kentucky home ” invaded, like every other, with the modern damsel’s pernicious attachment to “ drawn-thread work.”