A Librarian’s Job: A Los Angeles (California) Reporter’s Idea, from the LA Times ~1920

A librarian’s job is no light and sportive task. It requires a capacity such as few men possess. It is a serious occupation, fraught with staggering difficulties. To fill a librarian’s chair adequately means that a man must be built with broad sympathies, leniency, genuine intelligence, and a comprehensive understanding. One’s prejudices must be shored up, bound and gagged. One’s personal tastes must be put on a continuous diet of febrifuges.

A librarian must be temperamentally polyandrous and cut from an unbiased piece of material. He must be the shop girl’s idol, the old lady’s darling, the scientist’s ideal and the friend of the professional pundit. He must have temperamental affinities for all novelists from Hall Caine to Tourgenieff. He must tolerate all poetry from the passionate strophes of Ella Wheeler Wilcox to the metaphysical rumble-bumble of Browning. He must respect all scientists from Cagliostro and Lombroso to Ernest Haeckel and Pasteur. He must admire historians from Marco Polo and Sir John Mandeville to Fiske and Ferrero.

Furthermore, he must countenance equally spook-chasing, Christian Science, voodooism, psychotherapy, woman suffrage, New Thought, hell fire, single tax and physical culture. Literature dealing with esoteric fads, quasi-sciences, theologies, Emanuel movements and Yogi doctrines, he must keep impartially on the shelves for the delectation of their various proselytes.

And this is not all. An ideal librarian must be able to mingle with all the varied types of the genus homo. He must please the old ladies who would like to run the library. He must surfacely countenance the ravings of cranks. He must insinuate himself into the good graces of the juvenilia. He must be esoteric with the theosophists and pharmacological with the M.D.’s. He must know how to balance saucers at pale teas, and how to nibble macaroons and analyze the weather at the same time. He should know the wine when it is red and the high-ball when it is high. He must be able to officiate at female bun scrambles, lecture before women’s clubs, write articles on education, converse sympathetically on all themes, and be dexterous in the prestidigitation of statistics, so that he can prove conclusively any contentions or its reverse by a few figures. Also he should have mastered the science of platitudinizing.

And last, a librarian must be non-reformative. He must permit a differentiation in human belief and purpose. He must allow the reader to work out his own destiny. A citizen pays his money for the books he wishes to read, and it is outside the jurisdiction of the librarian and the library board to tell him what he ought to read. Moral superintendents do not make for progress.

In fine: A librarian must please everybody, and at the same time handle intelligently one of the greatest educational institutions in the world.

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