College and Research Libraries


Bookman par excellence was Bowker. His 
other interests, however, were numerous and 
varied; and he used tiis facile pen to focus 
America's attention on those causes in which 
he believed so firmly. He was a strong ad-
vocate of civil service reform, free trade, and 
anti-imperialism. He was a leader in the 
campaign of 1884 to elect Grover Cleveland 
President of the United States. He fought 
Tammany Hall in New York local politics 
with zeal and not a little success. In addition, 
Bowker was a successful industrial executive, 
serving as general manager and vice-president 
of the Edison Electric Illuminating Company 
of New York from 1890 to 1898. 

Education and the role of libraries in the 
educative process were consuming interests of 
Bowker. On one occasion he declared, "The 
library and the school together make the 
safeguards of America." A graduate of the 
College of the City of New York, Bowker 
maintained an active interest in the life and 
affairs of this college after his graduation. He 
was once invited but declined to allow his 
name to be considered for the presidency of 
City College. 

Bowker's last 30 years were extremely ac-
tive years, but they were conditioned by the 
hard fact of almost total blindness. From 
1900 to 1933 he was without his eyesight, but 
"he rose above this handicap and determined 
to live out his life as though no defect were 
there." That he was able to do this to a large 
extent is evident in the pages of Dr. Fleming's 
very fine biography of this militant liberal who 
was poet, author, editor, publisher, "literary 
ambassador at the Court of Fleet Street," 
political reformer, business executive, inventor, 
and world traveler. "We have in this book," 
writes Allan Nevins in his Introduction, "much 
more than the portrait of an arresting per-
sonality and the record of a noble career; we 
have a vigorous study of some of the principal 
strands of American liberalism in a period 
which needed all the liberalism that it could 
find."—John David Marshall, Clemson Col-
lege. 

Financing College Libraries 
Financing Higher Education in the United 

States. By John D. Millett, New York, Co-
lumbia University Press, for the Commis-
sion on Financing Higher Education, 1952. 
x i x , 5 0 3 P . $ 5 . 0 0 . 

This volume, which is called "The Staff 
Report of the Commission on Financing 
Higher Education," supplements the general 
report of the Commission, Nature and Needs 
of Higher Education, by presenting a summary 
of the information, gathered through seven-

- teen research projects undertaken by members 
of the Commission. The book is divided into 
four major sections, covering the objectives, 
costs, sources of income, and possibilities for 
the future financing of higher education. 
There can be no doubt of the importance of the 
information gathered here, although it might 
be questioned whether conclusions based 
largely on statistics covering a decade of de-
pression and a decade of inflation (most of the 
82 tables present comparative figures for 1930, 
1940 and 1950) are sufficiently soundly estab-
lished. 

But our concern here is particularly with 
the section devoted to library expenditures. 
These four pages (122 to 126) are perhaps 
not out of proportion to the space devoted to 
other aspects of college and university finances, 
but it is unfortunate that they are devoted 
almost wholly to consideration of the problem 
of the proper size of the book collections and 
are permeated by an apparent dislike of li-
brarians, a scolding tone found nowhere else 
in the volume. From the first paragraph, 
which concludes "again and again at the insti-
tutions we have visited we have found dissatis-
faction with and confusion about the library 
services of higher education" to the last "it is 
safe to predict that library operating costs will 
grow as one of the important expense problems 
of both colleges and universities," there is 
hardly a word of recognition that librarians 
have been at all concerned with the costs of 
operation. 

Let us first consider the remarks on li-
brarians. "Librarians constitutionally hate to 
throw anything away. . . . They are always 
chagrined when they cannot at once produce 
what is wanted." Since the two main purposes 
of a library are the preservation and the mak-
ing available of books we may, for the mo-
ment, allow this impeachment and admit that 
when we cannot do what we exist to do, we 
feel some chagrin. "Librarians rate the im-
portance of their jobs and examine their salary 
scale in the light of the size of their book 
collections, the number of their employees 
and their total expenditures." (If you prick 
us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we 

342 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES 



not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? 
And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?") 
Wherein <lo we differ here from deans, college 
presidents, or executive directors of such 
commissions as the present one? " T h e librarian 
[sic] profession as such puts little emphasis 
on economy; the pressure comes from college 
presidents and deans when they make up the 
annual budget." Since in the decade 1940-
1950 the proportion of the educational budget 
devoted to libraries declined by four tenths of 
one percentage point while the proportion de-
voted to administration increased by exactly 
the same amount, it seems as if the administra-
tors put the pressure on the libraries to take 
it off themselves. 

But we should consider D r . Millett's vari-
ous points seriously. Although the library 
expenditures of the institutions investigated 
doubled from 1930 to 1940 and increased 
nearly three times from 1940 to 1950, the 
expenditures per student for these dates were 
$9.59, $13.54, and $22.35. When these figures 
are expressed in terms of constant 1940 dol-
lars, so as to show the effect of the changes in 
the general price level, they become respec-
tively $8.49, $ 1 3 . 5 4 and $12.68. Although the 
libraries have not kept pace with rising costs 
during the last decade, it is impossible to tell 
whether service to the library users has suf-
fered or not on the basis of such a crude 
overall figure. Library meetings throughout 
the decade have devoted a great deal of time 
to consideration of various economies in op-
eration and if some part of this talk has been 
converted into action, the slight reduction in 
real expenditure may mark an actual increase 
in service. 

D r . Millett recognizes the importance of 
the library in the general educational program 
and elsewhere in this work notes "the exten-
sive browsing and the wide reading now in-
dispensable to a liberal education." Never-
theless he has "found general agreement as a 
rule of thumb that a 'good' liberal arts col-
lege ought to operate with a book collection 
of under 100,000 volumes, many of which 
would be duplicates," and devotes a full page 
to urging the weeding of collections. This is 
of course not new to college librarians, many 
of whom have had regular weeding programs 
in operation for years. It does no harm to 
have the need of weeding emphasized by an 
outside observer, however, and this may help 
to make us more aware of the problem. 

Whether the optimum size of a college library 
should be 25,000, 100,000, or more, however, 
must be determined by the methods of instruc-
tion in the particular institution. A college 
with a vigorous program of senior theses will 
require many more books than one devoted to 
an education based on classroom instruction. 
T h e emphasis given to faculty research and 
publication will also exert pressure on the 
size of the library. T o hold to any figure 
means, in the long run, discarding an early 
volume of a periodical for every current vol-
ume added—a program not apt to meet with 
much encouragement from either librarians or 
faculty members. As Branscomb says in 
Teaching with Books, "An arbitrary limit to a 
college library fixed at a point which involves 
eliminating all except the immediately active 
material seems to create more problems than 
it solves. Discarding should be as constant 
and as normal a process as additions, but it 
would seem wiser to let this be determined 
by the uselessness of the material or its avail-
ability in a nearby institution rather than by 
a determination to keep the library small." 

The Lamont Library at Harvard is given 
deserved words of praise, although whether 
the fact that the students "receive little refer-
ence . . . assistance," if it is a fact, is praise-
worthy might be debated. Some recognition 
of the existence of the Widener Library next 
door as an influence on the type of collection 
and sbrvice given at Lamont might be expected 
if this is held up as an example for other col-
lege libraries. 

T h e particular problem of the university 
library is the gigantic growth of research 
collections. Acknowledgement of the efforts 
to meet this problem by cooperative activities, 
the Farmington Plan, and the various deposit 
centers is made, although a fuller description 
of the Midwest Inter-Library Center is given 
in the chapter dealing with institutional co-
operation. T h e efforts of libraries to reduce 
both acquisition and storage charges by the 
use of microfilms and microcards are dismissed 
as "minor experiments." 

Attention is drawn to the doubling of li-
brary collections every twenty years. " I f this 
were to continue unchecked, and if much 
more income is not provided universities, they 
will soon be in the position of having to drop 
one or two professors each year in order to 
keep up the library. This is an obvious absurd-
ity." This apparently is a paraphrase from 

JULY, 1953 343 



K. D. Metcalf's "Universities Libraries Face 
the Future" (Library Quarterly 22: 6-7). 
". . . In our libraries we have a section of our 
universities that tends, year in and year out, 
in good times and bad, to increase in cost 
geometrically, while the rest of the institution 
grows arithmetically. It is obvious that this 
cannot go on without the library's taking an 
ever increasing percentage of our total re-
sources. That, expressed in other terms 
means that . . . each year . . . professors will 
have to be dropped so that the money from 
their salaries can be spent for library pur-
poses." The nub of the matter here is 
whether library costs increase geometrically 
while university resources increase arith-
metically. If total library expenditures are by 
1950 only 3.4 per cent of the total educational 
expenditures, such a process cannot have gone 
on for long. The experience of my own insti-
tution, shown on the following table, does not 
indicate any such discrepancy between the 
growth of the library and the growth of the 
college as a whole. Each tended to double 
every decade until the depression and each has 
roughly doubled in twenty years since. Is the 
long run experience of other institutions dif-
ferent? Dr. Millett concludes his book with 
a cautious optimism about the future support 
of higher education. Is there reason to be 
less optimistic about the future support of the 
libraries in this field? 

that costs have increased much more rapidly. 
Has this been true for a century or more? 
Have library costs in the past century in-
creased more rapidly than general university 
expenditures? Has the increase in costs been 
equally distributed among the service branches, 
the technical processes, the cost of books and 
periodicals, or are there discrepancies among 
these parts of the library budget? How far 
are the increased costs a reflection of addi-
tional services and a more adequate acquisition 
policy, and how far are they a reflection of 
higher salaries and higher book prices? If 
we can secure answers to such questions we 
would really begin to know something about 
the financial aspects of our college and uni-
versity libraries. The figures may be impos-
sible to obtain over very many years, but I 
hope some library school candidate will make 
the a t t e m p t . — W y l l i s E. Wright, Williams 
College Library. 

Lexikon des Buchwesens 
Lexikon des Buchwesens. Herausgegeben von 

Joachim Kirchner. Stuttgart, Hiersemann 
Verlag, 1952. Vol. I. 405 p. DM28.00. 
Libraries which were so unfortunate as not 

to have purchased the three volumes of the 
Lexikon des gesamten Buchwesens (i935~ 
I937) edited by Joachim Kirchner and the 
late Karl Loffler have had a difficult time lo-

1 9 0 2 1912. 1 9 2 2 J 9 3 2 J 9 4 2 x 9 5 2 

T o t a l institutional expenditure $ 1 0 7 , 3 1 3 $ 2 2 5 , 1 5 9 $ 4 1 3 , 8 5 8 $ 8 2 5 , 0 2 0 $ 9 2 4 , 0 6 8 
L i b r a r y expenditure 4 , 6 5 9 9 , 1 9 5 1 7 , 2 7 1 3 9 , 3 ° 7 5 1 , 2 0 6 
Percentage 4 . 3 4 . 1 4 . 2 4 . 8 5 . 5 
N u m b e r of students 390 533 587 809 873 
L i b r a r y costs per student $ U - 9 5 $ 1 7 . 2 5 $ 2 9 . 4 2 $ 4 8 . 5 9 $ 5 8 . 6 6 

The library is a minor part of the whole 
field of the financial aspects of higher educa-
tion and one cannot criticise an author for 
writing his own book. Nevertheless, a study 
of the brief remarks on library finances raises 
many questions which need to be considered. 
The only statistics dealing with any consider-
able number of libraries over an extended 
period of time with which I am acquainted 
are those which show the growth of book 
stock and indicate a widespread tendency to 
double every sixteen to twenty years. The 
figures given for two decades by Dr. Millett, 
as well as those cited from Williams, suggest 

eating a copy, and then only at a price of 
around $75.00. The answer to this problem 
has been provided in the form of a new edi-
tion by Kirchner with a slight changed title 
and a somewhat more modest format. How-
ever, the editor has undertaken such extensive 
textual revision that the term "second edition" 
seemed inapplicable, and accordingly he has 
even changed the title. 

While the present work contains sub-
stantially the same information that is in the 
earlier one, the changes are obvious. For 
example, the articles on Chinese printing and 
book trade, Indian and Indonesian book trade 

344 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES