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Honnold Library Record: Of the Lending of Books
From the Honnold Library Record, Volume 4, Number 1. Spring 1961:
Of the Lending of Books
There has recently been added to the Oxford Collection a little book entitled Remarks on the Practice and Policy of Lending Bodleian Printed Books and Manuscripts (Oxford, 1887) , written by the Waynflete Professor of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, H. W. Chandler. The author is disturbed about the growing pressure to make the Bodleian a circulating library. The argument had been presented that if professors were allowed to take books out of the library, they would get more work done. On that point the Professor of Moral Philosophy is dubious. “As far as my experience extends,” he observes, “the very notion of work, as opposed to fidgety pottering, is not possessed by fifty men in the place . . . Briefly at the present moment and in this place, all this wretched pretense of ‘work’ is arrant imposture. A few, and only a few, know what it means, and they would never dream of talking about it.”
“It seems to be the notion of some people in the University,” he goes on, “that the Bodleian Library is a fit place for readers of every kind. They have not knowledge enough of books or of libraries to see that a library suitable only to scholars . . . is not a library adapted to learners and schoolboys.”
Professor Chandler is pessimistic about finding many to agree with him for, as he says, “There is no denying that at the present day the public mind, as it is playfully called, and the University mind as well, is in a wonderfully flabby condition.”
Professor Chandler ought to have been a Professor of Librarianship, for he is here struggling with the problem of how to regulate the use of books so that they may be useful not only today, but intact and useful a hundred years from now, and with the even more difficult question of which mechanisms—freer lending, softer seats, larger print, or refreshments served in reading rooms—will best promote reading and scholarship.
The materials mentioned here are physically located in Special Collections. For more information on those materials, contact Special Collections.
What is the Honnold Library Record?
The Honnold Library Record, published from 1958 until 1975, was the publication of the Honnold Library Society, the friends of the library group, founded in 1954. All the issues of the Honnold Library Record are available online in the CCDL in the Honnold Library Record Collection.
— michael | September 24, 2007 03:16 PM | The more you know
