Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 239, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 October 1917 — Camp Libraries to Supply Soldiers With Best Reading Matter [ARTICLE]

Camp Libraries to Supply Soldiers With Best Reading Matter

Nothing is being left undone for the comfort and mental recreation of the men who are preparing to serve their country In the various training camps and cantonments throughout the country. The Y. M. C. A. was early In the field and besides Its many activities, providing for the moral and spiritual welfare of the men, it did all it could to provide proper reading matter for them. But the need of libraries furnished in a more adequate and scientific way was so largely felt that the United States government requested the American Library association to undertake the work. At once, it was decided to raise a mllllon-dollar war fund; not so much for the purchase of books as for the erection of suitable library buildings at every cantonment; for the transportation of books and for the purpose of securing the service of skilled librarians. The first step in the formation of the organization in charge of the mil-llon-dollar war fund was the appointment by Secretary of War Newton D. Baker of ten nationally known men and women to constitute a library war council. „ United, and co-operating with the war service committee are most of the prominent authors of the United States; practically all of the publishers, who have proved willing volunteers ; and practically all of the leading members of the library profession. All these are working in conjunction with the library war -council, the commission on training camp activities and the war department Itself. One of the heaviest items of expense at the beginning of x the work is the erection of 82 camp-library buildings at the various cantonments throughout the country. Each building will be 40 by 120 feet in size, one-story high, and will have accommodations for 8,000 or 10,000 books, newspapers and magazines, and living quarters for the staff. It is hoped and expected that each of these libraries will be in charge of a trained librarian. In each camp It Is planned to have a library headquarters with books and periodicals for read-ing-room use, together with a system of distributing agencies; affording to —the soldiers a kind of first-class city public library service. A careful survey of the entire field determined that $1 is thja amount necessary for the purchase, maintenance

and circulation of one book. One dollar, It has been figured, will furnish a book, keep it in circulation until It Is worn put, replace It when it is retired for physical disability, and all the time pay a share of the expense of properly housing and caring for these libraries in the various camps. It Is not to be imagined that the stupendous task of furnishing the soldiers with books; equipping, establishing and maintaining libraries, both stationary ~and traveling, is undertaken with, primarily, an educational idea. The books are needed not only to provide recreation for the soldiers when they are off duty, but to help counteract evil influences in the vicinities of the camps and cantonments. Books to read will help to make the camps so wholesome and attractive that the forces that tend to take men away from their duty will lose, at least part, of their charm. There Is no desire on the part of the American Library association nor the library war council to thrust educational books at the heads of men already tired from training and from fighting and who would desire recreation rather than the acquisition of knowledge. The aim has been and will be to provide in abundance volumes of short stories and novels of the more popular sort; and these when they are purchased, from the present fund, will be selected with all the acumen that comes to men whose lives have been spent In library service. A tentative list has already been prepared, and that it is tremendously democratic may be gleaned from the fact that it starts out with W. J. Abbot’s “Battlefields and Camp Fires” and includes novels by George Ade, Balzac, John Kendrick Bangs, James M. Barrie, Rex Beach, Hilaire Belloc, William Black, Booth Tarkington, Meredith Nicholson, Robert W. Chambers, Hall Caine, Winston Churchijl, G. K. Chesterton, Wilkie Collins, Irvin Cobb, Marlon Crawford, Richard Harding Davis, Charles Dickens, W. M. Thackeray, Conan Doyle, Lord Dunsany, Jeffrey Farnol, Edna I'erber, Montague Glass and—but one could go on and make a list of practically all the popular Americanand foreign authors and that list would probably prove a pretty accurate catalogue of the books that are to be furnished the American soldier, wherever he may be, by the library war council.

walls of the city of Tsinkiangpu. The grain warehouses of the towm, a place of 200,000 inhabitants, were overflowing with wheat, maize and rice, and supplies were constantly on display; yet there were no riots. The thousands outside the walls sat themselves down to die, while those within continued to transact the ordinary affairs of everyday life. During this famine parents found it necessary to sell their daughters to wealthy families in which they became slave girls. Early in the period of distress girls of ten to fifteen years of age brought as much as S2O each, but when the suffering was most severe the customary quotation in the slave market was 60 cents each, while In one instance a father Is known to have accepted 14 cents and two bowls of rice in exchange for his child.