law, medicine, theology, political science, sociology, economics,
art, architecture, music, eloquence, and language, the library should be
provided with the leading modern works.

9. We come now to fiction, which the experience of all libraries shows is
the favorite pabulum of about three readers out of four. The great demand
for this class of reading renders it all the more important to make a
wise and improving selection of that which forms the minds of multitudes,
and especially of the young. This selection presents to every librarian
and library director or trustee some perplexing problems. To buy
indiscriminately the new novels of the day, good, bad, and indifferent
(the last named greatly predominating) would be a very poor discharge of
the duty devolving upon those who are the responsible choosers of the
reading of any community. Conceding, as we must, the vast influence and
untold value of fiction as a vehicle of entertainment and instruction,
the question arises--where can the line be drawn between the good and
improving novels, and novels which are neither good nor improving? This
involves something more than the moral tone and influence of the
fictions: it involves their merits and demerits as literature also. I
hold it to be the bounden duty of those who select the reading of a
community to maintain a standard of good taste, as well as of good
morals. They have no business to fill the library with wretched models of
writing, when there are thousand of good models ready, in numbers far
greater than they have money to purchase. Weak and flabby and silly books
tend to make weak and flabby and silly brains. Why should library guides
put in circulation such stuff as the dime novels, or "Old Sleuth"
stories, or the slip-slop novels of "The Duchess," when the great masters
of romantic fiction have endowed us with so many books replete with
intellectual and moral power? To furnish immature minds with the
miserable trash which does not deserve the name of literature, is as
blameworthy as to put before them books full of feverish excitement, or
stories of successful crime.

We are told, indeed (and some librarians even have said it) that for
unformed readers to read a bad book is better than to read none at all.
I do not believe it. You might as well say that it is better for one to
swallow poison than not to swallow any thing at all. I hold that library
providers are as much bound to furnish wholesome food for the mi