Bibliotekspanik, anno 1885

The man who founds, or the corporation or committee which establishes, a free, public library in any community, is usually esteemed, without controversy, to have supplied the people with a great and wise benefaction. In many cases this persuasion holds true, but in very many others, even where the library is started on a fair foundation and with the prospect of continuing to be a source of rational entertainment and enlightenment -- a fount of blessing to the district in which it is placed -- the reverse of all this has too often resulted. And this has happened, probably in the large majority of such cases, because the managers in charge have weakly succumbed to the craving for fiction, even to the extent of supplying trashy, vapid, and often immoral works, only a very little better in their general quality than the average of the fiction retailed at the sidewalk news-stands. I have before me the report of a certain public library, and it shows that the proportion of works of fiction to those of science, taken out the past year, was as 54 to 1.