CHECK-LIST OF EARLY ENGLISH PRINTING, 1475-1640- PART II.

(Conclusion)

545

CHEMISTRY AND MANUFACTURE OF WRITING AND PRINTING INKS. A

PRINTED AT THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

form p5 [vili-28-25 1550]

THE

HE Bulletin is published monthly by The New York Public Library at 476 Fifth Avenue, New York Entered at the Post Office at New York, N. Y., as second-class matter, February 10, 1897, under Act of July 16, 1894. Acceptance for mailing at special rate of postage provided for in Section 1103, Act of October 3, 1917, authorized.

City. Subscription $1.00 a year, current single numbers 10 cents.

Printed at The New York Public Library, 476 Fifth Avenue.

August, 1925, Volume 29, Number 8.

BULLETIN

OF THE

NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

ASTOR, LENOX AND TILDEN FOUNDATIONS

VOLUME 29

AUGUST, 1925

NUMBER 8

THE LIBRARY SCHOOL COMMENCEMENT

At the Commencement, June 12, 1925, the presiding officer was General William Barclay Parsons, a Trustee of the Library. He said:

On this, the fourteenth Commencement of the Library School of The New York Public Library, I have the honor to extend on behalf of the Trustees of the Library a hearty greeting to the friends of the School who are gathered here to-day, a deep and sincere expression of appreciation of the high service rendered by the Staff, and to the members of the graduating class congratulations on the completion of their studies, and the best wishes for lives full of happiness and success.

As you young men and women, who today pass out with the certificate of excellence from this Institution, enter upon your careers, you will be told, perhaps, that the world is all awry. To this you may apply the time-honored retort that "it always has been" and add without fear of serious error that "it always will be." On that score, however, there is no need for discouragement. But if the old world is constant and faithful to her traditional condition, she has shown from time to time compensating fickleness in changing the nature of her awryness. It is the change and not the fact that makes the impress. What is the nature of the change that you will meet that differs from one faced by those other generations? No simple answer can be given. Life is far too complicated to justify one reason being assigned as the actuating cause of anything. All the relations are so involved, so interwoven, that it is wrong if not actually futile, and futility in practical life marks a high note in wrongness, to attempt to say that a result flows from any one step, or that a condition is brought about by a single or even a few impulses.

[ 527 ]

The peculiar feature of awryness that will confront you, and that will be for you at the same time an obstacle and your opportunity, is a peculiar unintelligent slant of public opinion that resists being told anything by the expert. Though unintelligent it is, nevertheless, powerful for the moment and must be reckoned with and not be ignored. To give it a name it might be called The Revolt Against Constituted Authority. It is not very new, for it has been in the making ever since perhaps the time when scientific criticism first came into being, and when in the light of modern discovery and research so many accepted causes were subjected to the new rigid analysis to see how far they conformed to true theory and actual fact. Such criticism and readjustment were scientifically done by persons well versed in their respective fields. Then the movement, continuing according to the laws of mechanics with its own internal momentum, gradually drifted into hands neither scientific nor competent and now it has become the fashion to rail at anything and everything that has been accepted as standard. Criticism and analysis leading to truth have given place to carping and uncontrolled antagonism that mark the path leading whither no man can tell.

We see evidences of this Revolt on every hand. In Government, where there is the desire to tear down whatever has been set up, whether it be an imperial autocracy as in Russia or the Constitution of the United States. The first has been replaced by the more terrible autocracy of unbridled demagoguery and the latter bids fair through amendments to be battered out of all semblance to that great document under whose principles of liberty and justice these United States have grown. We see it again in religion where present controversies are examples of individualism run mad. It shows its head, or hand, in education, with state legislatures dictating to men of science what they shall teach, exactly as was done to Galileo. It appears in the interpretation and administration of law, in the drama, business affairs and the home circle, and also in those realms that should be above interference — art, music and literature - the first is threatened with cubist designs, the second with jazz, and the last with every conceivable horror.

The Revolt is widespread among all phases of human activity and you will meet it in yours. Some people with no experience and no education will contest your sound claim to superiority in your chosen field. There will be those who will deny you the right of what they will term dictation, but what you will know to be only modest guidance. Those are the people who would reduce us all to the deadly level of mediocrity.

But this particular obstacle will be your opportunity and should prove by its annoying irritation to be an incentive to combat the reactionary spirit

of those who delude themselves and try to delude others by calling themselves liberals.

You have chosen for yourselves a great vocation to be the keepers of the mighty storehouses of human experience and the knowledge of all times. As such it will be your duty to see that the treasures committed to your care will be placed within the reach of those faithful few who seek the truth, to aid them in their quest, and so far as possible to bring them to the attention. of those others who for the moment fail to differentiate between sound achievement and personal notoriety. The opportunity is yours to help overcome the Revolt, and may the very difficulty of the task be to you an encouraging inspiration.

The principal speaker was Miss G. M. Walton, Librarian of the Michigan State Normal College, of Ypsilanti, Michigan.

Miss Walton read an address called:

THE LOST LIBRARIAN

We are told "The librarian who reads is lost," so I find myself on this, your commencement day, in a congenial company of lost spirits, for half an hour's talk of book lovers and book loves.

The word Commencement Day has always seemed especially inopportune for those entering upon our work, and in its place I would prefer Emancipation Day, that is, a release from the drudgery of the weary texts on methods, the necessary imposition of the schools, which henceforth will simply be one's tools, "books which are no books" as Charles Lamb tells us day of glad escape and an entrance into that haven of reading "anything which I call a book," again to use Lamb's words.

Of course, some may prefer to descend into that possible limbo which I hesitate to name, where not being lost they may devote full time and plus over time to the amenities of purely clerical, administrative and statistical functionsabsolving themselves from the delights of reading, upon which lost souls subsist.

Whence came this dictum "The librarian who reads is lost," whose authority still lingers so heavily, though happily on the decline owing perhaps to a change in attitude necessary to coping with the intelligent “Adult world" which we now are undertaking to educate?

I have always believed, from a fairly regular attendance of thirty-five years at the American Library Association, that the era of the phrase and its